Despite missing out on the winning title, Victorian team Kim and Suong aren’t letting their loss stop them from achieving their culinary dreams.
- byCynthia Wang

07 May
2018

While the two mum's from Melbourne weren't crowned winners in last night's My Kitchen Rules grand final, the competition has spurred them onto chasing their own dreams, including a restaurant and a cookbook. WHO caught up with Kim and Suong to see what they have planned...

WHO: Congratulations on making it to the grand final! Where were you last night when watching the show?

KIM: We were at home. Well, I was at home with the family.

SUONG: So was I!

KIM: Yeah, we were cooking our own family’s meals.

WHO: So you had to work even while watching yourselves on TV?

KIM: Yes. I was cooking while watching!

WHO: Did you re-live all the tenseness and excitement while watching the finale?

KIM: Yeah, when we were there, it was different, wasn’t it? And now we get to watch it on TV and it’s also different. But it brings back a lot of memories.

SUONG: A bit of an emotional rollercoaster, isn’t it? We tried so hard but we never gave up and that’s the whole thing. ‘Til the very last minute, we never gave up and we gave it all we had.

WHO: A lot of fans thought your kids stole the show! Was it fun to see them reacting to you?

KIM AND SUONG: [Laughs]

KIM: Wow, it was great to see them and they got to be there to share the moment and share the journey with us because they were there from the beginning. We left them at home for that reason so it was really nice to see them there with us sharing that moment, and obviously for us, we wanted to show them that in life, if you want something, you have to go and get it and I think having them there really shows them that, that they could watch us, see what we were doing and what we have achieved, so it was a wonderful moment.

WHO: Suong, they seem to be pretty tough critics, too!

SUONG: [Laughs] Oh, wow. I was surprised myself, actually! I’m going to have to go back and try harder!

WHO: Before winning, Alex and Emily dreamt of having a restaurant but you both had food dreams as well. Are you going ahead to turning them into a reality?

KIM: Yes, definitely.

SUONG: We have already started—we got back and already started.

KIM: We are going ahead with our dreams. My dream is to open my own restaurant and it’s on its way. Suong is writing her book and doing her catering, so yes, we are both pursuing our dreams.

WHO: The judges seemed uniformly happy with your food in the grand final, praising you for your flavours, and it seemed to viewers the edge might go to you. What did you learn from them?

KIM: Look, we have always valued their opinion and what they say goes, so we were very fortunate to be able to be there and to be able to cook for them win or lose.

SUONG: We’ve always considered ourselves as winners. Being on MKR is like winning the lottery unto itself, so to us, we’ve gone out there and given our best. We never took cuts.

KIM: We care about what we do and in real life, we’re friends! We cook with our heart and soul and every time we plated up, it was always about our heart and soul and hearing what the judges said about our food was great. It was a great feeling knowing we did something wonderful and we did a good job.

SUONG: We are proud regardless of what happened. Good luck to Alex and Emily because they are wonderful competitors and very nice people.

WHO: You both have a lot of fans out there…

KIM: We appreciate all the good words and the wishes from all our MKR supporters. It’s very touching.

SUONG: A bit overwhelming because we didn’t expect to have so many fans and even people in our Vietnamese community, a lot of them don’t have social media, and for them to come out on the street and shake our hands and saying how proud they are…

KIM: … and they’ve been watching, but we just didn’t know it, so I would say to them ‘Have you been on Instagram and they’d be like ‘No, but I’ve been watching!’ so we definitely have a lot of support from our community.

WHO: Have your family’s been asking you to cook all of these wonderful dishes like you did on MKR?

KIM: They’ve become very demanding of what they want to eat now because I know with my kids, my husband fed them tuna and vegetables the whole time I was away [laughs] so they were craving a lot of mum’s cooking so they still demand what they want to eat everyday.

SUONG: My kids still don’t understand what the fuss is about because that’s what they get a lot of time at home, I was like ‘Well people don’t get to eat that type of food.’ I guess that they’re very harsh critics and as long as they’re plates are finished and they’re bowls… nothing left in there, I’m just happy they’re eating food.

Cynthia WangCynthia is the showbiz writer for WHO magazine and was a longtime editor at People magazine in the US. Outside of work, she still watches an inordinate amount of reality TV and wants nothing more than to be a guest programmer on Rage.